We walked up the stairs in the sullen twilight of a forty-watt bulb. On the second floor Pen’s eyes strayed to a door that was scrawled over and over with makeshift wards and sigils and had been closed with a heavy padlock. She slowed for a moment. This was the lodestone that had been drawing her, and it was hard for her to walk on past it. But she knew there was no way into that room except with me and Imelda to act as Virgils to her Dante.
Imelda is a faith healer for the dead. Most of her work comes from zombies, who find that a laying-on of hands from the Ice-Maker slows down the processes of organic decay for a month or so at a time. That’s a precious boon to zombies, whose biggest problems are the ones that arise from a limited shelf life. But Imelda’s motto is ‘come one, come all’: she’ll help loup-garous keep their animal side in check at the dark of the moon, arrange for bereaved spouses and parents to meet their lost loved ones, and probably do a lot of other things besides that she wouldn’t advertise to a practising exorcist like me.
We continued our ascent to the third floor, where we knocked politely and waited. No wards on this door: no sprigs of hazel or hawthorn or stay-nots in crude, dyspeptic Latin telling ghosts and the undead to shove off without passing GO. Imelda likes the undead and makes them welcome. She’s a lot less certain about me, though.
From inside the flat there came the sound of a great many bolts being drawn back, and then the heavy door creaked open to reveal the wary but curious face of Lisa, Imelda’s sixteen-year-old daughter. She grinned when she saw me.
‘Oh, look what the cat sicked up!’ she said, in gleeful imitation of her mother. She stood aside and we walked through into Imelda’s hallway, which was no better lit than the landing but a lot more spacious: her flat may be falling apart but it’s built on a grand scale. The floor under our feet was actually slightly concave, a sign of some deep malaise of the floorboards hidden from sight by the bilious green carpet.
‘You’re looking well,’ I said to Lisa. ‘Does that mean you’re pregnant again?’
She punched me in the arm, which I took as a fair riposte. In fact Lisa had never been pregnant in the usually accepted sense of the word, but the ghost of a dead baby had taken up lodgings in her once — a regrettable side effect of having no wards on your door — and Imelda had called me in to persuade it to go elsewhere: that had healed a rift between me and the Ice-Maker, and it had made it possible for me to approach her when I had a problem of my own that seemed to need the touch of her skilled hands.
‘Your mother in?’ I asked, rubbing my arm because Lisa packs a powerful punch for such a skinny little kid.
‘I dunno. I’ll go see,’ Lisa said, and then without moving from the spot she bawled ‘Mummmmmmm!’ at the top of her voice.
A door slammed open in the recesses of the flat and heavy footsteps sounded, heading towards us. The rest of the building is empty, so any time you move you raise echoes as hollow and resonant as if you’re walking on a drumhead. Imelda likes it that way, though: she never has to keep the noise down for fear of what the neighbours will say, and there’s nobody to object to the odd hours she keeps or to the inevitable stream of mostly posthumous late-night callers.
Pen and I both looked off left as the footsteps approached the other side of a door whose paint looked not so much chipped as partially boiled. It swung open and Imelda loomed into view, stepping out of a room that was completely unlit. She was a formidable black woman, in her late fifties now but as imposing as she’d been at thirty, with a hard, beautiful face like sculpted ebony and arms like a pair of late-autumn hams. She was dressed in a midnight blue Ashoke-style dress that flowed like churning water when she walked. The Met office would issue a storm warning as soon as they caught sight of her.
‘Hello, Felix,’ she said, civilly enough. Then she turned to Pen and beamed all over her face. ‘Pamela! He’s been asking after you, honey. Doing nothing but. And when he’s not asking after you he’s thinking after you. I can tell every time, because he gets a Pamela look on his face that I can’t mistake for anything else.’
Pen smiled weakly but gratefully. ‘Can I see him, Imelda?’ she asked, putting her hand on the older woman’s arm.
Imelda patted it reassuringly. ‘You mean private?’ she said. ‘Of course you can. Just as soon as me and Felix have gone in there and done the necessary.’ And then to me. ‘Felix, shall we make a start?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘But then I’m on again after Pen. I need to talk to Asmodeus.’
There was a moment when a pin dropping would have sounded like a steel band.
‘Now that wasn’t in the deal,’ Imelda said with dangerous mildness. ‘Not the way I remember it.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘We won’t be talking about the weather, Imelda. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.’
The Ice-Maker wasn’t impressed. ‘I got a kid here,’ she said, waving a hand towards exhibit one. ‘You think I want to be summoning up demons in my own house?’
‘I’m not a kid, Mum,’ Lisa protested, scenting excitement. ‘I’m sixteen, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Don’t use that kind of language!’ Imelda snapped.
‘I think the pair of us can handle him,’ I said. ‘And you know you can lock him away again when we’re done. He’d be within the wards and he’d be on the leash. The whole time.’
‘There isn’t a leash short enough for that kind.’
‘There are two of us and one of him.’
Imelda shook her head, not only unconvinced but angry. ‘We had an agreement,’ she said. ‘I said I’d let that sick man stay here, and I said I’d keep his fever down — but that’s all I swore to do. He stays in that room. I go in to him whenever he needs me. End of story. Now you’re asking me to raise the fever up instead, and that goes against the grain of me. The stink of a demon in my place — it will make everything I do harder. I’ll live with it for weeks, and I’ll feel like I’ve got the damn flu the whole time. And that’s the least of it. Calling him makes him stronger, you damn well know that. So why should I do it, Castor? What have you got to tell me that will make me think it’s worth it?’
That was a good question. I decided to duck it until I could think of a good answer. ‘Let’s go ahead and get Rafi ready to receive visitors first,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll see if we can cut a deal.’
With an expressive look at me, Imelda swept away. I followed, and Pen remained behind. At this stage of the game, her presence was a wild card that we surely didn’t need.
Down on the first floor, Imelda traced a line around the padlock with a stick of charcoal that she took from the blue-black folds of her gown. Then she spoke to it before she unlocked it and left it hanging on the hasp. There were two further locks on the door itself and they both got the same treatment. Then she stood back and I led the way into the room — the moment of greatest risk, reserved for me because this whole thing had been my stupid idea in the first place.
I’d taken a lot of pains setting the room up in the week or so before we made the raid on the Stanger, so it was a big improvement over Rafi’s cell back there. It had furniture in it, for one thing, and a bookshelf with books on it — including his precious Kerouacs, Corsos and Ginsbergs — and an icebox with a few cans of Fosters floating in cold water that had been ice the evening before. All the comforts of home, give or take: nothing electrical, no TV or fridge, because things of that nature interfere with Imelda’s wards. But back at the care home, Rafi lived in a bare silver box and was given nothing that Asmodeus might use to raise mischief. Even his clothes had to be free of buttons and zips. By contrast, this was one of the corner suites at Claridges.
Rafi was lying on the bed reading the previous day’s Guardian when we entered. He sat up and nodded to us both.